Political Liberalism
Megan Gallagher | [email protected]
Sample syllabus
NB: This is designed as an upper division lecture course set to meet twice a week, though it
could be set as a seminar as well.
Course Description
The liberal tradition is best understood as a plurality of traditions tenuously linked through a
concern for liberty. What “liberty” is and how to define it; how to defend or protect liberty; who
or what grants liberty; who is entitled to liberty; how to juggle liberty and competing concerns,
such as security; whether liberty entails freedom from state interference or access to, and
protection of, certain rights; whether the state has any role at all in defending, defining, or
restricting liberty: these are questions to which liberal thinkers will provide an array of
competing answers.
Rather than attempt to provide a single answer as to what liberalism is or ought to be, this course
will provide a survey of essential works in classical political liberalism, beginning with its two
competing origins, the works of Locke and Kant. From there, we will examine Wollstonecraft’s
early liberal feminism; the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill; and the increasing emphasis on
social welfare with the rise of “new liberalism” in the early twentieth century. In later weeks, we
will turn to Rawls’s supremely influential theory of political liberalism and we will conclude
with challenges to the liberal project from feminist and critical race theoretical perspectives.
Primary Texts
Locke, Second Treatise on Government (1689)
Kant, “Answering the Question, What is Enlightenment?” and “Idea for a Universal History with
a Cosmopolitan Intent” (both 1784)
Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
Constant, “The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns” (1816)
Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1823)
J.S. Mill, On Liberty (1869)
Hobhouse, Liberalism (1911)
Rawls, “Justice as Fairness” (1958) and “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” (1997)
Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1969)
Skinner, “The Paradoxes of Political Liberty” (1984)
Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (1989)
Mills, The Racial Contract (1997)
Nussbaum, “The Future of Feminist Liberalism” (2000)
Available on Reserve
Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea (2014)
John Gray, Liberalism, second edition (1995)
Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism (1987/1995)
Alan Ryan, The Making of Modern Liberalism (2012)
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Requirements
• An in-class midterm exam
• A final paper due during exam week
• One page reading responses to be posted weekly on the course website the evening before
the first lecture. In addition to the week of the midterm, one week may be skipped at the
student’s discretion without penalty.
• Attendance
Grading
• Midterm: 30%
• Final paper: 45%
• Reading responses: 25%
Reading Schedule
Week 1 | The Lockean Foundations of Liberalism
• Locke, Second Treatise on Government, preface, chapters 2-5, 8-11, 15, 19
Week 2 | The Kantian Foundations of Liberalism
• Kant, “Answering the Question, What is Enlightenment?”
• Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent”
Week 3 | Liberal Feminism
• Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, chapters 1-4, 6-9, 12
Week 4 | The Centrality of Liberty
• Manent, “Liberalism after the French Revolution”
• Constant, “The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns”
Week 5 | Utilitarian Liberalism
• Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, excerpts
• J.S. Mill, On Liberty, chapters 1 and 2
Week 6 | Midterm | “New Liberalism”: Social Welfare
• Hobhouse, Liberalism
Week 7 | Freedom
• Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty”
• Skinner, “The Paradoxes of Political Liberty”
Week 8 | Public Reason
• Rawls, “Justice as Fairness”
• Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited”
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Week 9 | Feminist Critiques of Rawlsian Liberalism
• Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family, chapters 1, 5, and 6
• Nussbaum, “The Future of Feminist Liberalism”
Week 10 | Liberalism’s Color-Blindness
• Mills, The Racial Contract
Exam week | Final paper due
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